Bonfire Night and what collective joy actually does.

Collective joy is different from private joy in ways that neuroscience has only recently started to map. When we experience something pleasurable alone — reading a book, eating something good, seeing something beautiful — the reward circuitry activates and produces a particular kind of satisfaction. When we experience the same thing in the presence of other people who are also experiencing it, something additional happens. Social baseline theory, developed by researchers including James Coan, proposes that the nervous system of a social animal — which is what humans are — runs more efficiently when embedded in a group. The effort required to regulate emotion, to process sensation, to maintain attention, is measurably lower when surrounded by people engaged in the same experience.

The communal bonfire or fireworks display is not a superior version of watching fireworks on a screen. It is a categorically different experience. The cold, the crowd, the smell, the unpredictability of timing — these are not inconveniences to be optimised away. They are the conditions that produce the particular quality of attention my daughter had last Thursday: total, present, unspeaking. The social baseline theory, developed by James Coan, proposes that the nervous system of a social animal runs more efficiently when embedded in a group. The effort required to regulate emotion, to process sensation, to maintain attention, is measurably lower when surrounded by people engaged in the same experience.